NEITHER of those games do that. Nearly every coherent build can complete all content in D3. Some faster than others, but the game is designed so that every class has multiple builds that can complete every piece of content in D3 AND you can’t even change specs mid-GR in D3, so you literally CANNOT change specs between bosses in the hardest content.
And in World of Warcraft, it is also balanced so that every class can complete virtually all content with a coherent spec, without the expectation that people change specs between bosses. Yes people CAN do it and get an edge that way, but no the developers have not designed content to REQUIRE it. The only thing they ‘expect you to change specs’ between is pve and pvp, and that’s perfectly reasonable because they’re practically different games.
I’ve played hundreds of JRPGs and never been forced to change specs between bosses. I sometimes change specs because I’m bored of what I’m doing, but I have never felt forced to. (I suppose with the exception of games where they take party members away from you between bosses, because obviously if your party changes you have to change… but that’s not really the point of this discussion)
The uniqueness of the leveling process exists regardless of respec cost. BEcause everyone will choose to respec at different points, even if they have free respecs. No two playthroughs will ever be identical in a game with random loot. Respec costs are neither increasing nor decreasing that, although they ARE Decreasing build diversity endgame and decreasing the number of potential players who will play the game long-term by removing ‘people who just love to experiment on a day by day basis’ from the pool of potential long-term players.
Your argument is like 'we shouldn’t have seatbelts because people should be able to have cereal for breakfast. They’re two completely 100% unrelated things that have absolutely no correlation or connection to each other, so adding or removing them has literally zero impact on the other thing.
It takes like an hour of grinding at max to farm the materials for a respec token and I have never seen a guide advising you to respec more than 2 times while leveling up
Leveling is only a meaningful part of any RPG the first run through. Scaling enemies is probably the single best idea so that all of that content is not obsolete. Additionally, it allows for a fairly non-linear replay experience (except for the main story campaign which is still linear).
Based entirely on what devs have said, they expect leveling a character to cap to probably take less time than it does to farm enough for a near total respec. This means 2 things:
It is going to take a long time to grind gold so you really cannot change builds and try new builds end-game
Leveling is going to be so fast it is almost meaningless to have levels.
Neither of those things are good. You have to realize the way the game is designed, experimenting at low levels is not super reliable. Most builds will play and peform completely differently at different benchmarks. You might not even unlock the potential until you get a certain Aspect or Paragon point. Additionally, you might not even realize the effectiveness until you dump a ton of points in incremental power creep stats and skills.
My biggest pet peeve is that Blizzard has provided absolutely zero way for the Community to effectively Plan, Build, and Test their characters either in-game or through out of game Tools like Apps or Web Tools. Instead, they rely entirely on the backs of the community itself to develop those assets for them. Individual players cannot really gauge what is/isn’t effective or more importantly, fun, for them easily and they have to rely on YouTube videos, Maxroll, and Streamers to help them figure this out.
So, either Blizzard implements this (not likely) or gives players free-respecs with obvious rules to stop exploiting of swapping specs constantly so that players can experiment and have fun.
Nope you are wrong. D3 until recently could not be completed on the hardest difficulty. You were either blocked because you were too slow at trash or you weren’t strong enough to kill bosses. I hasn’t been until somewhere in the last year or two that power creep got to a point where multiple builds and classes could do GR 150.
Mythic raids are 100% balanced to where you are swapping specs between bosses when you are doing them at the intended gear level. The only time where you might not need to swap specs between bosses is when you overgear them through doing Mythic+.
Prove it. Find me one statement where they say this is the intended, tested design.
Every time I’ve seen them talk on the subject, they’ve said they’re okay with people doing that but don’t want people to feel forced to. So find me one statement where they say this is what they want people to do as the intended method of completion.
You’re making the absolutely absurd statement, so prove it with something concrete.
If you can’t, admit you’re just projecting without any proof and that you’re talking out your backside.
You must be unfamiliar with watching the RWF back when they would be in Heroic ilvl through splits prior to attempting the Mythic push. They 100% catered their spec to every boss. Heroic ilvl would be the intended gear level to complete the Mythic content btw. Anyone pushing the content past those first few weeks has inflated ilvl from Mythic+.
Again: There is a difference between ‘what the world first players are willing to do’ and ‘what the encounter is designed around’.
Find me one statement from the developers where they say that they INTEND for players to do that as the standard intended method of completing the content.
ie. where it is specifically designed with the idea that people will be swapping specs every fight. One statement from a dev where they say ‘We design the encounter assuming players will have swapped their specs before it’.
I am NOT saying players won’t do it. I am saying developers don’t design the encounter to force players to do it. And I want you to prove that I am wrong with a statement from a developer where they explicitly say that that is how they design the game. Find me one example. Doesn’t even have to be from WoW. One case, anywhere, where a dev states that they are designing that way.
Missed the part where you had played Nightmare Dungeon lvl 100 in order to add even a semblance of validity to your claim here …
That is your interpretation.
Mine is that they are wanting the leveling process per season and per class to be more enjoyable since we will already be experiencing the leveling process once per season per class we want to play.
You seem to be also be stuck in the “finding meaning” in being stuck in a spec.
There is nothing keeping you from having that. You can never respec if you’d like. Other’s choosing otherwise doesn’t prevent that.
This is an odd. Wouldn’t respec be similar to having the undo functionality?
Asking it to draw something for you seems like that’d be more akin to using a bot to play your character for you.
@ other folks …
Please keep in mind that unless the devs explicitly said something, that you’re offering your interpretations from what they’ve said and their intentions.
Exactly. Every time I see a developer interview with almost any developer, the message is the opposite. I’ve seen a lot of dev interviews say things along the lines of “We don’t want anyone to ever feel pressured to change spec just because something is better, but we want to make it easy if you choose to do so” or “We’ve tested our content to ensure that a variety of comps and specs can complete it, so you should be able to bring your friends regardless of what they choose to play for most content”.
So I’m eagerly awaiting them to provide me the comment where they state the opposite.
D3 is balanced this way. From the leveling speed to the armory to the season rewards to the way they alternately push some skills and reign others in to the fact that all loot found below max level is trash, it is built around the idea that characters can swap their skills around easily. Players who chose not to do that would miss out on the things being added to the game, and would gain nothing by leveling a new character each time because that experience is basically intended to be skipped.
Now, I will grant that if they choose to balance this game the same way (greatly accelerate leveling, no loot found below level 100 is endgame viable, season reward items geared for very specific builds, seasonal challenges targeted at max level players), then it will cut against the respec cost as a part of the design. Current indications are that this is not their plan, though.
Not engaging with you until you find me a developer saying this.
You’re just talking out your behind assuming how they develop the game, and that’s just uneducated guesses at best. Find me a dev comment, an interview, a twitter statement from an actual developer, etc. that backs it up or else you’re just bsing us all.
Give me proof or else you’re just making your own assumptions based on your own biases.
RWF is not doing stuff at intended ilvl lol they are doing it between 3 to 7 or more ilvls under the tuning. There is a reason that those initial states get nerfed within weeks because the tuning is so insanely off that when a hotfix goes in can determine who gets world first.
Not sure if you are intentionally misunderstanding, but I’ll give the benefit of the doubt. When I say, “D3 is balanced around people swapping specs all the time,” I don’t mean, “the devs want people to swap specs so they force them to do that,” I mean, “the incentives and challenges in the game assume that people can swap specs all the time.”
ya, I remember back in the older days they always said that they balanced the encounters assuming your average Ilvl went up a tiny bit after each boss because you were assumed to clear boss 1 at least a few times before boss 2 went down. And so on. Which means it wasn’t, at least in the olden days, balanced around ‘week 1 clears’.
Nowadays with all the other alternate gearing paths, I can only imagine that they probably expect even higher ilvl per subsequent boss due to things like the vault and mythic+, etc. But I haven’t heard them discuss it recently, so I can’t say that with 100% confidence.
But that’s not ‘balanced around it’, that’s ‘you feeling pressured because the option exists and you don’t want to use it’. Balanced around it would be the Devs EXPLICITLY want you to do it and tune the game around the idea that the majority of players do it or even explicitly forcing players to do it by having the numbers be so tightly balanced that you can’t do it without doing so.
You feeling pressured because the option exists and other people are using it does not mean ‘the game was balanced around it’. You picking your spec and then boss #2 of a dungeon is too hard for you in your current spec so you have to swap but then boss #3 doesn’t work for that spec for a different reason so you have to respec again… that’d be ‘designed around it’.
The devs can’t control whether a few specific people feel bad because other people are having fun in a different way from them…
And again: Every interview I’ve ever heard from a WoW, FFXIV, D3, or any other MMO or ARPG dev has always said ‘we balance such that most well thought out specs/classes/builds can complete most content’ - which is the exact opposite of what you’re saying. Which is why I find it so mind-boggling that you are assuming without evidence that they’re doing something they’re explicitly saying they’re not and why I was hoping you had some proof.
I mean, if you want to define those words your way that’s fine. Im telling you what I (and I assume many others making the same point) mean when saying those words. We feel pressured because the option exists and we don’t want to use it, yet the game’s incentives and challenges assume that we will.
Well I don’t know what to tell you. The words the devs use on some blogs are not more important to the experience than the actual mechanics in the game. And the actual mechanics are balanced in a way that assumes people will swap skills frequently.
Good, then I guess they will be free to ignore the small number of D4 players who will want to level a character once then constantly be changing the skills.
Except… they’re not. Nearly every pieceo f content in d3 can be completed with like 50 different specs… and greater rifts explicitly lock you OUT of changing spec mid encounter. So they’re literally not designed that way. The option just exists because people wanted it. lol
